It’s hard for me to watch the coverage of the fires burning in Southern California right now because it brings back memories of my own personal experience with out of control wildfires.

Seven years ago, I vividly recall evacuating my own hometown as the Cerro Grande Fire bore down on my hometown of Los Alamos, New Mexico, ravaged the mountains, destroying more than 400 homes, and causing more than $1 billion dollars in damage.

My family evacuated to the nearby town of Santa Fe and stayed with some of father’s co-workers. Because my parents refused to let me evacuate with our desktop computer, a decision I’m still bitter about, I had to borrow our host’s laptop and their dial-up internet connection to get online. Their phone line would be busy for the next few days as I used my hotmail account, AOL instant messenger, and my mom’s cell phone to begin to try and check in with friends who had been scattered to the far corners of the state (and beyond), figure out where everyone had evacuated to, and share the horror of watching our town burn down on live television.

I instant messaged with friends, sent out email newsletters to anyone whose address I could get my hands on listing where people had evacuated to, and organized meetups for the evacuees in the area (I believe several evacuation hotel room parties were also organized).

Looking back now, I suppose it was my first taste of online organizing.

Today, as I watch the coverage of the fires in Southern California, I see that online technology has evolved to provide almost up to the minute coverage of the current disasters.

MSNBC is asking for submissions from viewers live on-air, Yahoo News is posting stories with a Flickr badge so that anyone can upload photos of the fires to their new "You Witness News" beta, and Google Maps mashups are being used to track the fires and the burned and evacuated areas. Bloggers such as “And Still I Persist” are chronicling the destruction house by house while video clips of the destruction are being watched by thousands on YouTube. The LA Fire Department is even getting in the Web 2.0 game by sending out Twitter updates.

We’ve seen the roots of this marriage of disaster and technology before; the collective shared experience of a national tragedy coupled with the immense interest in any new information out of the chaos. Early elements of this trend could be seen on 9/11, as websites sprang up to document the tragedy and remember the victims. Or there was the remarkable collaboration between the Times-Picayune and NOLA.com during Hurricane Katrina, the photos shared on Flickr from London during the 7/7 bombings, and the use of Facebook during the VA Tech massacre.

Seven years ago, I was a high school student with an internship with the Los Alamos National Lab’s Emergency Management and Response (EM&R) Division in their Emergency Operations Center (EOC). The EOC would become the centerpiece of the interagency fire response to the Cerro Grande Fire as it threatened my hometown, Los Alamos and the multi-billion dollar national nuclear laboratory it housed.

In the first days of the fire, before the evacuation, before the fire reached critical mass, I was assigned to the emergency radio console in the EOC where I logged all of the activity and messages. Later I would take over the important task of clicking “refresh” on a National Weather Service page to determine which way the winds were shifting. Millions of dollars of government communications and technology that surrounded me provided a view slightly less detailed than you can now get from the Google Maps mashup.

But all of the Google Maps, Flickr photos, and YouTube videos in the world can’t convey the true scale of destruction left behind, the awesome unstoppable power of a rampaging wildfire, or the tragedy of having your friends and neighbors lose their homes, even if your own home manages to survive.

Somewhere out in Southern California right now there’s another high school kid like I was once, trying desperately to figure out where his friends are, if everyone he knows is OK, in order to combat his feeling of helplessness at being unable to save his own home. But unlike me, he’ll have the web 2.0 tools to do it.

disaster | fire | internet | Web 2.0
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